Annual reports by a United Nations commission monitoring alleged support for al Shabab by the tiny nation of Eritrea repeatedly describe Rogo as "a known associate of members of al Qaida East Africa and an advocate of the violent overthrow of the government of Kenya."

The latest report, published in July, details how a Kenya group known to raise money, recruit fighters and plan terrorist attacks in Kenya, the Muslim Youth Center, has continued to operate with "relative freedom."

According to the report, Rogo was closely associated with the Muslim Youth Center, as well as with a similar al Shabab-linked group in Tanzania.

Kenyan police had arrested Rogo several times, but he’d been acquitted in the courts every time; embarrassingly, some say, because his activities were hardly concealed.

"Extremism is growing, not only in Kenya, but all over Africa," said Juma Ngao, a moderate cleric who chairs the Kenya Muslims National Advisory Council. In Kenya, radical ideology is spreading primarily from Somalia, he said. "It is very, very serious."

Ngao blames a host of factors: anti-Americanism, youth unemployment, "bad theology" and opportunists profiting from trafficking fighters into Somalia.

The whittling away at the old social order is also apparent in Kenya’s politics, where a popular, confrontational brand of American-linked evangelical Christianity has inserted culture wars into the national debate, similar to how the Moral Majority group influenced the political conversation in the United States in the 1980s.

The Christian coalition campaigned against Kenya’s new constitution – which eventually passed with 70 percent of the vote in a 2010 referendum – largely out of concern that it would open the door to legalized abortion, which it has not. It also campaigned to end the use of Islamic law through what are known as Kadhi courts, even though its application was limited and used only in cases that involved Muslims. Kenya promised protection of the Kadhi courts when Britain joined the Muslim coastal strip to the rest of the Kenya colony before independence.

Adding to the turmoil here is growing support among Muslims for an outlawed secessionist movement, the Mombasa Republican Council.

Last week, when the riots began spinning out of control, Ngao and other Muslim leaders reached out to their Christian counterparts in an effort to halt the violence before it spread, he said, vowing that Kenya must not be allowed "to become like Nigeria."

But he admitted that some churches refused to participate. Some Muslim clerics shunned the dialogue, too.

"The mad ones," Ngao said, widening his eyes to appear crazed.